Sunday, October 18, 2009

Wine, Women and Song - Part III

Wine, Women and Song: Some Remarks On Poetry and Grammar - Part III

Lasciviousness

Rambam

In the first part of this essay, we have discussed the offenses of literature against grammar; a far more incendiary issue is the question of lasciviousness. Judaism seems to have historically been somewhat ambivalent on the matter; it is an ineluctable fact that many of our most celebrated poets, particularly of the Arabic and Mediterranean cultures, have written some rather provocative verse, but it is equally true that there has also been vociferous opposition to such literature.

Rambam has a staunchly puritanical attitude toward song; he argues that a lascivious song is actually worse for being composed in לשון הקודש. He does concede, however, that "גדולים וחסידים" apparently disagreed with him and granted a sort of broad moral poetic license to verse composed in Hebrew:

Immanuel of Rome

One of our most notorious and controversial poets was Immanuel of Rome, a prominent and celebrated figure of thirteenth and fourteenth century Italy. His entry in the Jewish Encyclopedia goes so far as to claim that he was “the most interesting figure among the Jews of Italy”, but hyperbole aside, he is certainly one of the most famous poets in Jewish history:

The originality that Immanuel lacked as a scholar he possessed as a poet. In his verse this is given free play, and his poems assure him a place for all time. The child of his time, in sympathy with the social and intellectual life of Italy of that period, he had acquired the then prevalent pleasing, easy, humorous, harmlessly flippant tone, and the art of treating questionable subjects wittily and elegantly. He composed both in Italian and in Hebrew. Only a few of his Italian poems have been preserved. In a truly national spirit they portray and satirize the political or religious conditions of the time. Immanuel was held in high regard by the contemporaneous Italian poets; two Italian sonnets referring to his death have been preserved, which place him as poet beside Dante. Immanuel in fact knew Dante's works, and drew upon them; in his own Italian as well as in his Hebrew poems there are very clear traces of the "divine poet."

Of course, his poetry has always been quite controversial among his more puritanical brethren:

Immanuel's "Diwan" was printed at Brescia 1491, Constantinople 1535, Berlin 1796, and Lemberg 1870; the last chapter also separately, Prague 1613, Frankfort-on-the-Oder 1713. Some passages have also been translated into German, e.g., the introduction and ch. 28, and the latter also into Italian. Yet the book is little known or disseminated. His contemporaries even censure Immanuel as a wanton scoffer, as he is occasionally flippant even in religious matters. He fared worse with later critics. Moses Rieti excluded him from the hall of fame that he erected to Jewish sages in his "Miḳdash Me'aṭ" (c. 1420). Joseph Caro even forbade the reading of his poems (Shulḥan 'Aruk, Oraḥ Ḥayyim, 307, 16). Immanuel Frances censures, his "wanton songs," and warns all poets of love-songs against imitating them ("Meteḳ Sefatayim." pp. 34, 38). This criticism is due to the strong admixture of the lascivious, frivolous, and erotic found in the poems. Never since Immanuel's verse has the Hebrew muse appeared so bold and wanton, notwithstanding that his work contains poems filled with true piety and even with invitations to penitence and asceticism.

As my brother observes, Immanuel was the Lipa Schmeltzer of medieval Italy.

A Problematic Stanza and Its Problematic Authorship

The critical stance toward Immanuel's verse is eloquently expressed by Rav Baruch Epstein, who cites one particular stanza as the archetype of the immoral and unholy admixture of the sacred and the profane:

Rav Epstein's outlook is quite problematic, however, and he has apparently made a profound error here; the stanza which he sees as the archetype of the egregious in Immanuel's poetry actually appears (with a couple of minor differences) in ליעלת החן, a classic series of love poems written by the universally revered Rihal!

Immanuel independently conceived of the same poetic image previously imagined by Rihal

It is interesting that this is not the first time that confusion has arisen about the authorship of this stanza. It is cited in a commentary to Shir Ha'Shirim by an unknown author of the late twelfth century (a century before Immanuel), who attributes it to an anonymous poet:

While we have earlier considered the possibility that Immanuel may indeed have written the lines that Rav Epstein attributes to him, I have not been able to locate them in his מחברות, and although I have not made an exhaustive search, I think it is safe to assume that if Brody, the great scholar of medieval poetry, who actually eventually published an (incomplete) edition of the מחברות [11] does not cite, in his lengthy and detailed note, a parallel passage in Immanuel, then Rav Epstein is simply mistaken.

[Additionally, Rav Epstein had apparently seen the text of the anonymous מלקט, the work of Kohn, or some derivative of one of them, and not the original poem, as he has צוארךand יש לברךin place of לחיךand אברך. His attribution to Immanuel, though, is quite baffling.]

[אודה ולא אבושthat until encountering the aforementioned note of Brody while researching this essay, I had never heard of him, but I then serendipitously read Rabbi Haim Sabato's wonderful The Dawning of the Day (Yaacob Dweck's English translation of Sabato's כעפעפי שחר), and I was delighted to notice that Brody makes an appearance therein, in a typically delicious Sabato anecdote:

Among those listening to the dawn hymns was ... that very same respected man of letters and scholar of poetry, Doctor Yehudah Tawil, who had immigrated to the land of Israel from Aleppo in his youth. He had excelled in his studies at the Hebrew University and now gloried in the title of his doctorate. During the singing of the dawn hymns Doctor Tawil sat off to one side. As much as he participated, he still kept himself aloof. It was as if he were proclaiming that he was not actually a member of the community. He was both an insider and an outsider. He cherished the dawn hymns for their poetry. For all that he wanted to uphold the traditions of his father and his father's fathers, he was a scholar of the Hebrew poetry of Sepharad at an important university and not a simple song lover like the rest of the congregation. For they sat and sang from booklets of the dawn hymns printed in Jerusalem by the cantor Asher Mizrahi, and their primary concern was the cantor's solo and the transitions between the different musical modes. If the cantor mangled the meter or wrecked the rhyme in order to accommodate his melodic flourishes, they simply did not notice. While they clearly did not understand the words of the dawn hymns and experienced them as emotion, he sat with the great tomes of the medieval Hebrew poets published by Haim Brody in Berlin at the turn of the twentieth century. On numerous occasions, Doctor Tawil would chuckle to himself when he heard the simple souls confounding the verses of the dawn hymns. But at times he was so overcome with passion that he would rise from his seat. Enraged, he would approach them and interrupt their singing. Using the great tomes from the university he would try to show them the correct version of the hymn and exactly where they had made their mistake. They listened to him, either out of respect or to appease him and to prevent him from starting a troublesome quarrel. Everyone remembered the great dispute between him and the Cantor Nissim Dweck, about a single letter that denoted the definite article in a poem by Ibn Ezra. The cantor stubbornly refused to pronounce that one letter. Even after Doctor Tawil adduced proof upon proof from verses in the Bible, writings of the Sages, and medieval manuscripts, Cantor Dweck refused to listen to him. The cantor told him, "This is the received tradition from our fathers, and our fathers from their fathers, for many generations. We will not change our custom simply because of what you people have learned from scholars at the university." Doctor Tawil took to his feet and held to his opinion, raising his voice until all the singing for that Sabbath was thrown into disarray. Since that incident, everyone knew that one did not argue with him.[12]

[Emphasis added.]

Sensuousness in Rihal's Poetry

Returning to Rav Epstein, according to all the above possibilities but the first, his point would seem to be utterly untenable; would anyone dare accuse Rihal of being מקדיח תבשילו ומקלקל מעשיו? Moreover, even if Rihal did not indeed write this particular verse, Rav Epstein's thesis remains untenable, since Rihal undeniably did write odes to the charms of feminine cheek, hair, bosom and so on, such as the stunningly beautiful but amazingly sensuous יונה על אפיקי מים, in honor of a bride, containing vivid depictions of the woman's physical attractions and the enchantment that they have wrought upon the poet, who longs to gaze at, caress, and kiss her:

The dilemma, though, remains: why is Rihal revered, and Immanuel condemned? Ultimately, this question, hinging on subjective judgments about taste and style, may be impossible to answer definitively, but as Justice Stewart once said in a similar context:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it[16]

While I am not that well versed in Immanuel's verse (after all, we are enjoined against reading him!), I think that although Rav Epstein is quite wrong in his conception of the unacceptable in poetry, Immanuel's work may nevertheless have been viewed as containing quite distasteful endorsements of immorality, going beyond the relatively innocent celebration of passion and love that we find in Rihal.[17] I leave a more articulate, thorough and satisfying explanation to others better versed in the literature in question and the traditional Jewish attitudes toward poetry and immorality.